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MEMBER DIARY

Health Care

The Dems have me thinking about health care costs collectively rather than individually. We should stop encouraging people to eat healthy, loose weight, not smoke, not abuse alcohol, not abuse drugs, etc. Those folks should die young, quickly so the rest of us (who already know better) have more money for nursing care in our dotage.

The President is correct when he says that we all want the best health care we can get without preforming unnecessary tests, proceedures or treatments. The debate is about who gets to decide what are “unnecessary tests, proceedures or treatments.” Do we want a government panel creating generic rules that cover all of us without consideration individual circumstance? Or do we want the doctor and patient to decide what is best?

Innovation and technological advances have contributed significantly to health care cost increases. Just as individual spending for home technology has exploded in the last 40 years so has medical technology. Government control of health care will definitely inhibit this innovation, the resulting costs and the resulting medical care improvements. Of course, no one will know what we missed.

As long as someone else pays for health care, there will not be any consideration for what treatments might be unnecessary. This significantly increases costs. The patient has to have some skin the game. Currently, most of us have our employer and his insurance company between us and our doctors. If we add the government it will only get worse!